Maintaining Uptime

Read Article

Power protection has been on mind of every organization, what with major roll-out of new technologies and demands for 100% uptime. By Jasmine Desai

A data center life cycle is typically 10-20 years and the product refresh is happening more on the compute side every three to four years but the same is not applicable for physical infrastructure. Power lies at the bottom of three tiers. The bottom tier is physical infrastructure, second is servers, storage and networking and topmost is the business application layer. If the middle layer is changing every two years as per the Moore’s law then the passive infrastructure needs to be upgraded.

According to Pratik Chube, Country General Manager – Product Management & Marketing Emerson Network Power (India) Pvt. Ltd., “What customers are looking at is how a vendor improves on TCO. It does not mean the CAPEX or the initial expense but the recurring or operational expense. If it is not adaptive then it becomes cumbersome for them.” Companies are looking at scaling up their power and cooling based on the compute demand. If there is insufficient cooling then the system can reboot or stop functioning. Consistent power supply is essential.

UPS systems are critical for guaranteeing the business continuity of any industrial or commercial enterprise. All business critical equipment must have a faultless and clean power supply if they have to operate efficiently. The power critical equipment is growing significantly due to constant demand of reliability and uptime and UPS business also growing along with that. According to the recent Frost and Sullivan report, the total Indian UPS market was estimated at $528.5 million in 2010-11. The growth rate in 2010-11 over 2009-10 was 10.6% and it is projected to exhibit significant growth rates up to 2017-18, due to steady demand from sectors such as government and infrastructure, information technology and information technology-enabled services (IT/ITES), banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, and telecom. The expected growth rate at a CAGR of 6.6% and touch $828.2 million by 2017-18.

Suhas Joshi, Director Sales UPS, Delta Power Solutions, said, “The market for UPS in India is worth about Rs 3,500 crores, which is growing at about 8 to 10% YoY. The verticals that are actively investing are education. BFSI, Basel 3 and Basel 4 implementation and the government sector. Verticals that are on a path of decline would include ITES.”

The criticality of IT infrastructure has increased the dependence on power protection solutions. Customers want reliable and scalable products. Secondly, there will be a lot of coordination happening between vendors and customers to customize power protection solutions. Modular UPS will be more in demand. Scalability is what customers are looking for. SMEs are getting serious about investing in IT infrastructure, which has given a substantial boost to the UPS market. However, investment from the corporate sector has decreased. “Out of the overall IT investment, only 20% is spent on the data center and the remaining 80% goes towards the rest of the IT infrastructure. Due to adherence to regulations like BASEL II, organizations are aggressive in implementing the latest technologies for which power protection becomes a backbone,” added Joshi.

According to Nareshchandra Singh, Principal Analyst, Gartner, “There is an increased need for a higher amount of power and cooling in data centers because of the changing profile of IT equipment.” Servers have migrated from single to quad core processors. Therefore, every rack in a data center is more power hungry than in the past. The growing adoption of blade servers has played its part in driving up the power density of racks.

2012-13 is definitely going to stir up lot of interest on organizations front. Vilas Pujari, CIO, ACG-Worldwide, said, “There will be lot of investment in the power and cooling area due to multiple reasons. Firstly, the uptime requirement of servers and other IT resources have gone up to 100% as compared to 98%, which was the case earlier. With an increase in mobility, people are interested in accessing servers anytime anywhere. The new servers require a fairly stable temperature that too in a narrow range, because of the reliability they have to provide.” Thus, in a present scenario having UPS only for the servers may not meet the full requirement and organizations have to ensure that precision ACs are also provided along with the power supply. Also the computing resources are increasing with automation coming into play and more user operational area coming under the purview of IT operations. A lot of data is getting digitized, which leads to an increase in storage requirements, which results in additional power, cooling and UPS requirements. The possibility of providing high uptime has been built into the servers now. However, any minor glitch can lead to downtime.

Considerable challenges

It is not so much challenge of hardware provisioning as of technology. Also, there are certain expectations pertaining to these challenges that organizations have. The knowledge on proper utilization of these resources is lacking with the IT teams. Typically, they come from application management and do not know much about power and cooling. Therefore, IT teams need to be trained. Proper knowledge transfer needs to happen when vendors set-up the UPS and batteries. With increase in cooling and power requirements, the technology will also change in these areas. The vendor should also provide proper SOPs for smooth operations and testing and checking. Also, another difficulty faced by organizations is that there are really few vendors providing solutions in this space.

Pujari from ACG-Worldwide said, “They are trying to build an ecosystem of partners. However, the knowledge transfer from principals to partners itself is not happening in an appropriate manner. This hampers gaining the full benefit of the technology.”

According to a whitepaper from Emerson Network Power, different applications have different requirements, depending upon the size and type of equipment being supported, the cost of downtime and the organization’s availability goals. Plus, disruptions in power availability and quality can originate from a variety of sources and take a number of forms. Also, the environment being protected is not static: availability requirements may increase over time and the contents of the data center are subject to regular change. Therefore, one needs to look at if any vendor is offering adoptive architecture or not which depends on reliability, scalability, flexibility and TCO.

According to Singh of Gartner, “One has to work more with utilities to make them understand the kind of demand one has. That is likely to be a challenge in many parts of India. On the systems side, they have to provision distribution unit and have a proper backup.” Not having a proper provisioning and backup increases cooling requirement. The general ratio of cooling requirement is 1:1. E.g. 5 kW of power require for a rack and equal power is needed for cooling. One has to optimize the cooling provision in a data center. Beyond hot aisle/ cold aisle one has to do containment also so that the zones are not mixed and a lesser amount of cooling can also do a good job.

The power protection market is diversified. Vendors like APC and Emerson are moving away from being just hardware providers to solution providers. They have to keep energy management solution mixed in their offerings. In many cases, they are also metamorphosing into service providers. E.g. Emerson is taking up lot of data center building projects. Singh of Gartner commented, “Companies will be interested in a lot of energy management software. It all gets to management and not procurement of technology.”

In an ideal world, electrical utilities would deliver clean, reliable power to business critical systems. Unfortunately, this is not the reality. Appropriate systems are required to ensure necessary power availability and quality is achieved as simply and cost effectively as possible. These factors make issues such as lifecycle costs, adaptability, and ease of service more important than ever when selecting appropriate power protection. Another factor that determines power protection is the type of redundancy one goes for. A lot of careful should go into it before opting for any particular redundancy level.

Green power protection

The need to be ‘green’ has prompted UPS manufacturers to adopt green practices. “Delta itself has a Gold Green recognized factory. All Delta plants worldwide are also green certified plants. Also, while manufacturing our products, we go for green components such as PCBs,” said Joshi.

According to Jerome Rodriguez, Managing Director, Socomec UPS India,“The market is shifting towards the concept of modular UPS and high efficiency transformerless UPS. The market demands a UPS system with high efficiency, even at partial load, to reduce operating costs and to be a part of green revolution.”

A modular UPS allows the end user to invest according to his actual load and to upgrade systems as the business grows, without hampering uptime, reliability and availability. Modularity provides the ability to ‘pay as you grow’. This can be an attractive option as it can reduce up-front costs, but modularity must be evaluated in light of projected capacity requirements. If capacity is expected to increase significantly, a larger fixed-capacity UPS may prove more cost-effective in the long run than the combined initial cost and expansion cost of a modular system.

The initial cost of a power system represents only part of the total costs of owning the system. Initial costs will always play a significant role in the decision-making process; however, organizations are increasingly factoring lifecycle costs into their technology purchasing decisions. This is relevant to power systems in terms of performance and capacity planning. There are also flywheel UPS systems, however, they are utilized only by state of the art data centers.

The power protection in turn will give significant rise to energy management market. According to Aniket Patange, Director – Professional Services, APC by Schneider Electric, “Data centers in particular have witnessed a high level of awareness and need for energy management solutions; to name a few in the space of UPS, IT management and power systems. CIOs in India are keen to learn more about how energy management can improve the efficiency of their operations, maintain a high level of uptime, safety and standards and effectively add to the organizations.” CIO’s are beginning to understand the need to invest in energy management solutions and that this is an investment that can pay for itself in the long run.

Energy management, on the other hand, goes beyond recording and measurement and provides analytical tools for identifying opportunities to reduce the energy consumption. Energy management solutions will be one of the business objectives and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives of most large companies. There will be an increased focus on analytical tools that will help organizations complying with voluntary reporting standards such as Carbon Disclosure Project, Global Reporting Initiative, and possibly the Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT) mechanism.

Singh from Gartner said, “As against the global market; Indian organizations are not very aggressive in bringing down energy consumption. The energy consumption also starts hitting you when data centers become highly consolidated, that is yet to happen here.”

The responsibility of the power bills still lies with facilities in many organizations in India and not the IT department. Therefore, IT is not held responsible if power bill increases all of a sudden. Also, certain concepts like free-cooling have not yet penetrated the Indian market. Really large organizations have invested in free cooling chillers. However, it will be a while before these technologies trickle down to all enterprises.

Inappropriate weather conditions and high costs will prevent the adoption of these. All in all, the power protection market looks exciting; however, one needs to follow best practices in managing the entire show. CIOs can take some learnings from data centers in the west that have managed to bring the PUE levels to 1.5 and how have they managed to monitor and maintain the consumption regularly.

[email protected]

If you have an interesting article / experience / case study to share, please get in touch with us at [email protected]

Advertisement